You
hear it everywhere. Even from Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the
vicious anti-migrant legislation that has polarized the US. “We are a
nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” he says.

And like almost everyone else, he’s got it
wrong.

The original Europeans in what is now the US
were not immigrants, but colonists. And the US is not a nation of
immigrants -- it is a white colonial settler state, like South Africa
under Apartheid, the former Rhodesia, Australia and Israel. Like those
states the US has always operated on a sometimes hidden, sometimes overt
system of Apartheid.

Like those places, the US is a nation of
colonists -- and race laws.

It is a place where white colonists arrived,
seized the land, and dispossessed, exterminated or attempted to exclude
the original “non-white” peoples -- all of them.

They did so at the point of a gun -- by open
terror and genocide, which was the precursor and the necessary
pre-condition of European “immigration.” And, of course, they didn’t only
use guns and overt terror. Where “necessary,” they operated by “law.”

Let me prove the point. It’s simple. We all
know the facts.

In the US, Native Americans were
dispossessed, subjected to mass murder, and locked on separate,
Apartheid-style “reservations.” So it stands today.

Africans were enslaved, and once “freed,”
they were subjected first to Jim Crow, then, when that proved no longer
advisable, Jim Crow was transformed into the mass terror of mass
incarceration and permanent Apartheid-style ghetto-ization. So it stands
today.

The Indian nation of Mexico was conquered in
a racist war of aggression by the US in 1848. The only debate in the days
of “Manifest Destiny” was not whether to seize Mexican / Indian land, only
how much of it to seize, and what to do to keep the Mexicans out of what
had been stolen.

Two choices were before them. These were the
terms of the debate: take the whole nation and lock the people on
reservations, or take as much land -- with as few Mexicans -- as possible.
Thus the border was established through a race war, through brute and
overtly racist violence. The border is an Apartheid Wall. So it stands
today.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the
first significant law restricting immigration into the United States.

The Act claimed that “the coming of Chinese
laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities
within the territory” of the US -- the same racist rhetoric used today
against other Brown people. Like HR4377, the current notorious immigration
bill, the Chinese Exclusion Act made it illegal for “any Chinese laborer
to come, or… to remain within the United States.” So it stands today. Only
the immediate target of the law has changed.

Every group the US has sought to eliminate
or exclude has been a people of color.

The logic is simple. Allow entry or
citizenship for those who can be “assimilated” into the colonists’ culture
-- those who can become loyal colonists themselves -- and exclude the
“Other” -- those who are the targets of colonialism -- those whose land,
cultures, bodies and souls must be sacrificed for the colonists to remain
dominant and for their system to function.

Immigration law has always been race law in
the US. As far back as 1790 the Federal government ruled that the right to
become a naturalized citizen was reserved to "free white persons."

So it remained until 1952. Until then the
Supreme Court repeatedly determined exactly which migrants might be
considered “free” and “white,” as applicants of various ethnic backgrounds
sought to become citizens.

Today, “The Nation of Immigrants” theme is
struck to avoid the historical and cultural truth. Europeans -- who could
be assimilated to colonial culture -- were allowed entrance en masse.

But there was a “stark division,” as Haney
Lopez reminds us, based on skin color.

“This stark division necessarily also
carried important connotations regarding, for example, agency, moral
authority, intelligence, and belonging,” he writes. “To be unfit for
naturalization -- that is, to be non-White -- implied a certain degeneracy
of intellect, morals, self-restraint, and political values; to be suited
for citizenship -- to be White -- suggested moral maturity, self
assurance, personal independence, and political sophistication.”

In other words, those “unfit” for
citizenship were the colonized. The description Lopez offers for the
“unfit” matches precisely the characteristics ascribed to colonized
peoples by European imperialists and settlers for hundreds of years.

It also matches the racist stereotypes
offered today of immigrants from areas south of the US border with Mexico,
who Congressman Sensenbrenner has referred to as degenerate “alien gang
members terrorizing communities.”

But the racial subtext around immigration is
not a subtext. It is the text itself.

Before Europe could “immigrate,” someone
else had to be removed. Before there was land to settle it must be stolen.
Before anyone could be “free and white” someone else had to be “non-white”
-- and enslaved. Before “Americans” could become “Americans,” “Latin
Americans” -- who are overwhelmingly Original Americans -- had to become
something else -- “Latinos,” “Hispanic,” the not-Native -- the Alien.

The Illegal Alien

In a stunning bit of triple think the
Natives, who knew no borders, became “Aliens,” while Europeans became
“Americans,” and “Americans” became “Natives,” while the Original
Americans became “foreign” infiltrators and lawbreakers bent on
who-knows-what brand of “terrorism” against “innocent” colonists, or if
you prefer, “Americans.” Or “Settlers.”

Or is it “Afrikaners.” Take your pick.

The Six Nations Confederation -- the
Iroquois, or Hau De No Sau Nee -- wrote in their classic Basic Call to
Consciousness that colonialism means “to be controlled from afar,”
that “colonialism is the process by which we are systematically confused,”
and that confusion is “an agent of control.”

Like this.

“We are a nation of immigrants, and laws.”

But sometimes someone slips, forgets the
double talk, and makes the agenda clear. They don’t mean for us to
overhear, but they can’t help themselves.

In his mercilessly racist article
Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants?,Lawrence
Auster slips. He writes, “[T]hroughout its history the United States has
been a member of Western civilization -- in religion overwhelmingly
Christian… in race… overwhelmingly white, in language English. Why
shouldn’t those little historical facts be at least as important in
determining our immigration policy as the pseudo-fact that we’re all
‘descended from immigrants?’”

Auster, and David Horowitz’ Front Page
Magazine, want one thing; they know what it is, and they’re willing to
tell you. They want a white nation. They slipped.

The many who write diatribes and hate mail
on the theme of “What part of ILLEGAL don’t you UNDERSTAND?!” also slip.

We understand “illegal” perfectly well.

Conquest of territory in wars of aggression
is illegal under international law. The US occupation of most Native land
and all of the occupied sections of Mexico is illegal. The presence of the
conquering people, the usurpation of the land itself is illegal. The
colonists themselves are illegal aliens.

But, for the Right, it’s not really about
some imaginary adherence to a just, neutral system of “law.”

It’s about race law and white privilege.

And race law, codified on paper or not, is
deeply codified in white people’s expectations about their place in
society, and some of them are getting dangerously edgy about having
“their” land -- their turf -- stepped on by Brown people.

On the web site of the anti-Mexican hate
group Save Our State, correspondents calling themselves “USA Today”
write:

To be honest we are heading for a
Balkanization and a racial cleansing.

I know its not politically correct to say so
but I think lots of folks see it coming and I'll bet the vast majority of
Americans would have no problem with genocide as a last resort to save
this country, Usually when you back somebody into a corner they will
defend themselves by any means ... get it?

Does this sound like something you would
hear the Nazis say? Sure it is but I spend lots of time scanning the
forums and blogs and its coming from normal, everyday people that are just
about fed up with the whole mess.

I know a large number of Germans didn't
agree with Hitler but they didn't exactly act against him either.

Just keep pushing and pretty soon you'll
find the American people in a corner.

On that day, Beware.

People who think like this are the social,
cultural and political base of politicians like Jim Sensenbrenner.

They are classic colonists, with the
colonizer’s outlook. For them, mere “immigration” is impossible. Their
“forefathers” conquered the land, so those coming here must be out to
“re-conquer” the land -- to take it back from them.

These are the true inheritors of the
American Dream, a dream which, for the colonized, has been nothing but a
nightmare. They intend to defend that nightmare -- no matter what it
takes.

That’s what “immigration reform” and
“immigration control” are really all about. Colonialism. And the race laws
that defend it.

Juan Santos
is editor of Mexica Tlahtolli, a Chicana/o-Native American
newspaper in Los Angeles. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.